So, I am now the proud owner of a genuine trucker's tan. :) We have had a couple of beeeeeautiful weekends, working on the yard, cleaning up the dead leaves, tearing down ugly mismatched plastic lattice and broken bamboo fencing that the previous owners had put up around their horrible raspberry bramble patch, making a compost pile, and pruning the trees. Luc has been feverishly trying to make the lawn grow grass, which seems to be a losing battle at our place - we thought it was patchy last year, now it's downright endangered - so our yard is a maze of flourescent pink tape (a futile attempt to keep Tigger and I off the lawn), and we rejoice when we see the microscopic blades of grass almost nearing 1/2 an inch long... ;) It's fun, we're enjoying the yard so much more this year.
We bought a BBQ too, and a patio set, and I hung my solar lanterns up in the trees above the deck. Speaking of trees, we got a great quote from a local guy who will take down our three ugly juniper/cypress trees that are growing up against the house, and also, they'll be 'felling' the huge pine tree in the front, whose top half broke off in the ice storm. (It's hideous). It's sad to me, as it was once such a big, solid tree, and I'll miss having that blocking us from the street. That said, I do plan to do some research into what kind of tree to plant there in its place. I'd LOVE an oak tree, but they're so huge, I'm not sure it'd be a good idea in our relatively small front yard... Maybe a flowering/fruit tree to feed the birds would be a better option.
Anyway, we decided to focus on the back yard this year, and then we'll work on the front yard next year.

So, I was reading the newspaper on Friday (which I never do), and noticed there is an abundance of doom and gloom stories about food shortages on the rise. So much so that Walmarts in the US have imposed rice rationing, as people have begun hording the available rice, in expectation for the price hikes to come. People in BC have started this as well. I wasn't aware of it before, but it seems that all over the world, countries are suffering from severe food shortages, and Luc was telling me that in Haiti, they've resorted to baking cookies out of clay and eating them, in place of any grains or rice. Sad. :( Here, smaller stores have already begun to see the effects. One store in Ottawa says that over the last few weeks, his bags of rice went from $15 to $30, and another merchant says that where she used to sell her rice for $40 a bag, she now has to buy it for $50, so she's trying to take care of her customers by not making any profit off it, and selling it for pretty much exactly what she paid for it.
Then there were various conflicting articles, one stating that global food shortages are a symptom of rising gas prices, as it's costing farmers a lot to produce grain products, and those farmers who use the grain products to feed livestock have similarly been impacted as they now have to pay more to keep their animals. From this persepctive, bio-diesels or other renewable fuel sources seemed to be a possible answer. However, another article was poo-pooing Ontario's recent decision to invest $600,000 into bio-diesel farming, as it entices farmers to divert land from their agricultural production over to the production of crops for bio-diesel. It seems a vicious cycle as you can't lower prices of crops and solve food shortages if the fuel prices are sky-rocketing, but if you have to sacrifice agricultural production in order to lower the price of fuel, you still won't be able to produce as much food. Hmmmm...
Seems either the media is being typical and blowing EVERYTHING out of proportion (along with companies who are inventing new crisis situations in order to benefit from the fear-based consumerism they spark) or, we're truly facing the 'Age of Scarcity' as the paper put it. Even today, I saw another ad on the internet for Go Blue.org, a group focused on conserving Canada's apparently dwindling fresh water supply. So now, in addition to not consuming excess energy, food, products made in environmentally unfriendly ways or with similarly destructive materials, and conserving gas, we are also being told to cut back on water. According to the site, http://www.goblue.org/en/, our fresh water is in limited supply, as it comes from age-old glaciers that are now melting at a rapid rate. If we don't cut down our consumption now, we will apparently be faced with water shortages, as the fresh water doesn't renew itself. Canada is apparently guilty of major over-consumption of its water supply, compared to countries in Europe. That surprised me as we really don't have a huge population.. Maybe we're just as bad as our Southern neighbours afterall.
Hmmm. I'm confused a bit on this one though because doesn't it rain? I mean, I know we've enjoyed a LOT of fresh water, maybe, because of the glaciers, but I mean, the water doesn't go away when we use it, it continually gets released back into the environment, where it falls back onto the Earth, and if it happens to land on ground that filters it (and doesn't contain salt) voila! You have fresh water. Where I'd see a problem is if we're busy polluting any of the fresh water that does recycle itself back into the Earth (and yes, I imagine we most certainly are poisoning the heck out it).Anyway, just to add another layer to the multi-cyclical growing pile of issues, the site states that things such as nuclear energy (touted in one of the articles I read as a wonderful source of renewable, clean energy and another possible remedy to our fuel issue) comes at a cost as it depletes the fresh water supply.
Can we ever win? Apparently not, if it's true that the population is expected to rise between 40 and 50% over the next 50 years... And they hit that little 'annoyance' spark within me by showing a picture of one of the new suburbs that are all going up at an alarming rate. With cookie-cutter (ugly), cheap-material houses, sandwiched together with their postage stamp lawns and row upon row of dismal, blasé paved, treeless streets. Gaaaaghh!
Yet one more reason why I think I need to go find an island where idiots aren't allowed, and furthermore, where we need to slow down on the reproducing - surprising too since the avg family has like 2 kids (so they only replace themselves)... That's one more excuse for me to become a crazy dog/cat lady instead of a 'soccer mom' anyway... :)
S